When Tom Wakely won a Democratic congressional primary last month, he didn’t get a single call or message of congratulations from any local Democrats.

In part, that deafening silence reflects the near-hopeless task before him: trying to unseat Lamar Smith, an entrenched Republican incumbent who has represented U.S. District 21 — running from North San Antonio to South Austin — for three decades. But it also indicates how disconnected Wakely is from the political game, and the players who regularly take the field.

In this year of open rebellion against political institutions, even the biggest backroom deal-makers want to be perceived as outsiders. But for Wakely, the shoe fits.

How else to describe a Bernie Sanders devotee who helped César Chávez organize grape boycotts in the 1970s, became a Unitarian Universalist pastor in the 1980s, ran a jazz club in Mexico in the 2000s and now uses his white-brick North Side home as a veterans hospice?

Wakely, 62, kicks off his general-election campaign Saturday afternoon at Tilo Mexican Restaurant (two blocks from his campaign headquarters), marking the white-bearded activist’s graduation from a self-described role on the political fringes to a spot closer to the center of the arena.

The only political office he ever sought prior to this year was a Wisconsin school board post he won 25 years ago. That probably would have been the end of his political career if not for the encouragement of Lucy Coffey, a World War II veteran who died last March in San Antonio at the age of 108. Coffey, the country’s oldest living female veteran at the time of her passing, befriended Wakely near the end of her life.

One day, Smith visited Coffey at the hospice run by Wakely and his wife, Lety, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico. After Smith concluded his visit, Coffey realized who he was, and remembered that he had voted against a 2010 bill designed to provide billions of dollars for medical treatment to 9/11 first responders.

“She was so upset with this guy,” Wakely said. “She said, ‘Someone needs to run against him.’”

Wakely decided to be that someone.

His primary victory over businessman Tejas Vakil provides Wakely the honor of being political roadkill for Smith, who has been mowing down Democratic rivals since Donald Trump was on his first marriage. Over a span of 30 years, Smith has never won a general election by a margin of less than 25 percent.

Wakely’s general-election campaign probably won’t be much better funded than his shoestring primary effort, but he’s already bulked up his skeletal team with three young Democrats who worked (two as volunteers and one as a staff member) on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. And if Wakely is destined to be Smith’s latest victim, he wants to stir up a Sanders-like revolutionary ruckus along the way.

“Everybody is tired of Lamar. They’re saying he’s been there too long,” Wakely said. “All over the country, people are ready for a change.”

During his primary campaign, Wakely even broached a subject which most of Smith’s opponents have shied away from over the years: the congressman’s Christian Science faith. In a post on his primary campaign website, Wakely suggested that Smith’s religion — which looks to prayer, rather than medicine, for healing — has made the congressman reflexively anti-science and colored his dismissive attitude toward climate-change research.

“They (Christian scientists) believe pain is an illusion, and if you pray hard enough, that pain will go away,” Wakely told me last fall, shortly after he entered the District 21 primary race. “I guess if you can deny that climate change exists, it’ll go away.”

For his part, Smith, the chairman of the House’s Science, Space and Technology Committee, has argued that he’s not hostile to science, but simply wants to determine if political appointees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pushed scientists to adjust climate data.

When I talked again to Wakely this week, he said he’s not sure if he will bring up the religion issue during the general-election campaign, but he reasserted his belief that Smith’s faith has influenced the congressman’s climate-change position.

Wakely isn’t kidding himself. He knows it will be almost impossible to change the political climate of District 21 in the span of a few months. But, at the very least, he’s hoping to put the heat on Smith.

Gilbert Garcia is a native of Brownsville, Texas, with more than 20 years experience writing for weekly and daily newspapers. A graduate of Harvard University, he has won awards for his reporting on music, sports, religion, and politics. He is the author of the 2012 book, "Reagan's Comeback: Four Weeks in Texas That Changed American Politics Forever," published by Trinity University Press. One of his feature stories also appeared in the national anthology, "Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001."